Edgar Williams, 82, Planner Of Allies' Alamein Victory, Dies

By ERIC PACE

Published: June 30, 1995

Sir Edgar Williams, a British Army officer and scholar who helped to win a key World War II battle and to get Rhodes Scholarships awarded to women, died on Monday in Oxford, England, where he lived. He was 82.

His death was reported yesterday by The Associated Press.

At his death, Sir Edgar, who was knighted in 1973, had been an emeritus fellow of Balliol College at Oxford University since 1980.

He rose to the rank of brigadier in World War II and for part of the war was the chief intelligence officer under the British commander Bernard Law Montgomery, a general who became a field marshal in 1944 and later was made Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.

Sir Edgar worked for the United Nations in 1946 and 1947 and was a fellow of Balliol College from 1945 to 1980. He was long active and influential in the Rhodes scholarship program as Warden of Rhodes House in Oxford from 1952 to 1980 and as secretary of the Rhodes Trust from 1959 to 1980.

Montgomery wrote in his memoirs (1958, Da Capo) that Sir Edgar -- known in the army as Bill -- was "intellectually far superior to myself or to anyone on my staff," and "it was a conversation with him which gave me the idea which played a large part in winning the Battle of Alamein."

In that decisive 1942 victory, the British forces broke westward out of their defensive position in the area of El Alamein, a village in northern Egypt. They routed the opposing Axis forces and went on to drive them westward across Libya into Tunisia. Total Allied victory in North Africa followed, in 1943.

Montgomery wrote in his memoirs that, in a conversation only days before the battle, Sir Edgar, who was then a major, pointed out to him that the German commander, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, "had so deployed his German infantry and parachute troops that they were positioned between, and in some places behind, his Italian troops all along the front, the latter being unreliable when it came to hard fighting."

"Bill Williams's idea was that if we could separate the two, we could smash through a purely Italian front without any great difficulty," Montgtomery added. "This very brilliant analysis paved the way to final victory at Alamein."

The Daily Telegraph in London said on Wednesday that Sir Edgar went on to be, at Oxford, a skilled mentor to new Rhodes scholars, "who came to appreciate his pithy, elliptical and above all candid comments on their progress."

In 1977, 48 new male Rhodes scholars arrived at Oxford, along with the first 24 women in the 75 years since the multinational program had been set up.

Sir Edgar explained: "The men in most of our constituencies, especially the States, have been used to competing with women throughout their academic careers, and I felt, and the trustees agreed, that by definition the type of chaps we wanted for the scholarships would not want any unfair advantage."

One of the Americans who passed through Oxford on Rhodes scholarships in Edgar Williams's day was the young Bill Clinton, from 1968 to 1970. When Mr. Clinton was campaigning for the Presidency in 1992, it is said that Sir Edgar refrained from comment -- about coping with permissiveness or about other subjects -- except to observe that at Oxford, Mr. Clinton had let his hair grow "to look like a cavalier."

A clergyman's son, he went from King Edward's School in Sheffield to Merton College at Oxford, where he studied history, did brilliantly, and earned an M.A. in 1938.

He was awarded the United States Legion of Merit in 1945 and received honorary degrees from a dozen colleges and universities, including Williams and Swarthmore colleges in the United States.

He is survived by his wife of 49 years, the former Gillian Gambier-Perry; their son and daughter, and a daughter by his earlier marriage, in 1938, to Monica Robertson.